True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  By then I didn’t exactly live in fear of inquisitive phone calls, but it was one of those unpleasant possibilities lurking in the background, like the awful diagnosis you fret about when you visit the doctor. It turns out, however, that ever since Clinton’s Executive Order 12958 took effect, employees of the darkness-craving agencies, the bureaucratic vampires and wolves and tarantulas and moles, have been quietly crawling through every inch of those declassified files, reclassifying thousands of them, dragging them page by page out of the light and back into their federal caskets and nooks and burrows.

  So I’m not counting on the government to shrug and hand over the missing pieces of the puzzle it may have. I’ll pursue other tracks. I’m about to spend a long weekend in Washington, flying out to celebrate Sarah Caputo’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I’ve also scheduled drinks with another well-placed pal—a man I shouldn’t name, a former beau, the closest friend I made during my three and a half years in D.C.—who might be able to pull a string or two to help with my research.

  “Dean Hollander?” I look over to see my assistant, Concepción Perez. “Mr. Alex Macallister of Wheel Life Pictures is on the line. He’s calling from Beirut.”

  I smile. “Of course he is.” Another Bond moment. Although weirdly, in the books, Bond never went to an Arab country. With a fingernail, I slice a Nicorette out of its foil-and-plastic bubble. “Close the door, Connie?”

  “Hallo, Hollander! It’s been such a bloody long time!”

  Again I smile. I never quite remember until he opens his mouth just how British Alex sounds. The enduring impact of his four years in London during the 1970s is incredible. “Your ears must have tingled last winter, “ he goes on. “I was in Prague for the renaming of the airport after Havel, and raving with your old pal Přemek about how much we adore you. Why on earth do you and I never see each other in the City of Angels?”

  Why? Because you’ve invited me to your place exactly once, almost two years ago, during my Supreme Court fame bubble, and whenever I asked you to dinner during the previous five years, you had your assistant cancel at the last minute, once with a text message.

  “Hiya, Alex! Great to hear your voice. Vacationing in Beirut, huh?”

  “It’s over forty here, maybe forty-five!” On Planet Alex, temperatures are in Celsius. “Although not as dodgy as you’d think. But I’m hardly on holiday. An acquisition mission, actually. I’m trying to cobble together Cars Two.” An exhibit that Alex assembled, which he considers art and calls The Cars, has been traveling around the world for a couple of years, drawing large crowds. It consists of automobiles in which famous people died—General George Patton’s Cadillac, James Dean’s Porsche Spyder, Jackson Pollock’s Olds 88, Albert Camus’s French coupe, Jayne Mansfield’s Buick Electra. The only one not a wreck is the 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible in which John F. Kennedy was shot. I remember reading that The Cars, the band, reunited to play at the opening of the show at the Armory in New York, and that the only vehicles Alex wanted but couldn’t acquire were Grace Kelly’s Rover and Princess Diana’s Mercedes.

  “Can I trust you?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I answer immediately. “Yeah.”

  “But really. This is hush-hush. Completely confidential. I demand lawyer-client privilege.”

  “I’m not your attorney. What is it?”

  “Celebrated people don’t much die in road accidents anymore. The Princess of Wales was the last. For a new piece, a piece about this century, I’m trying to buy up the important car-bomb cars.”

  I am speechless for a moment. Is he joking? Of course not.

  “Day before yesterday we acquired the remains of the pickup truck that killed Rafic Hariri. Remember?” Hariri was the former Lebanese prime minister assassinated by a suicide car bomber—truck bomber—nine years ago in Beirut. “Karen, this is so much more difficult for me than The Cars.”

  “Yeah, I would imagine.”

  I wonder for an instant if he means difficult psychologically, emotionally. Of course not.

  “Luckily, we’ve got some significant friends over here. Americans. We’re still working on getting a loan of Rafic’s Mercedes, which I really must have—the piece only works as a diptych, the truck and the Mercedes together. The family are softening. An important fellow in Pakistan really wants to sell me bin Laden’s last Land Cruiser, and I was tempted, but it’s off-message for the show. And in Afghanistan, Iraq, oh my God, you can imagine the provenance issues. People try to diddle you with fakes constantly. Or else they’re offended and call me sick.”

  “Really? Huh. Fancy that.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what the Nazis said about modern art, too. So, Hollander: this autobiography of yours, cleaning off and tarting up this old picture of yourself to put on display. I guess with me in the background. You doing restoration or conservation?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I’m a lawyer, Alex.”

  “No, you’re a writer, Hollander, like you always dreamed of being, and now you’re a writer of fiction as well, an artist, a fabricator of tales. Although the gal in your novel, the heroine? Seemed highly Karen Hollanderesque to me.”

  His flattery throws me off track. “You read Objection, Your Honor?”

  “I considered optioning it. Anyhow, my point is that you know now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication. In painting, in the art world, restoration, some wise people, the Russians, the Italians, think that old pictures are what they’ve become—and don’t uncover the repainted sections, don’t fill in the scratched-away patches, accept and respect what the years have done to alter the image. Whereas American restorers go for what they call ‘deceptive retouching.’”

  “Whatever I’m writing, it’s not deceptive. The opposite.”

  “No, no, you’re misunderstanding. Deceptive retouching tries to make an old picture look exactly as it did originally. Like people who color their hair.”

  “Are you suggesting my hair color isn’t naturally St. Petersburg Champagne Blonde?” Trying to keep things light!

  “Which is impossible, of course. Deceptive retouching is fictionalizing that pretends it’s the real truth. Like Colonial Williamsburg.”

  “You’re losing me here. I’ve never even understood what ‘postmodern’ means.”

  “Just a straight-shootin’ plainspoken old-fashioned midwestern lady lawyer. Please.”

  “I’m trying,” I say, “to write an honest and accurate account of certain parts of my life. Our lives. Our dreams and fantasies. There’s so much I’d forgotten.”

  “So you’re writing some kind of 1960s Our Town set in Wilmette? The upper-middlebrows should go for that big-time.” He’s audibly relieved. “ ‘One sweltering summer afternoon, as the cicadas chirped and heat lightning flashed over Lake Michigan, Chuck Levy and I stopped at Smithfield’s grocery to buy some lemon drops for a nickel, and the moment I spotted that poster for Dr. King’s speech on the village green, my life was changed forever.’”

  I force a laugh. “Not exactly.”

  He’s pissing me off, which feels good, because it makes me want to stop beating around the bush and tell him the truth about the truths I intend to tell. Or maybe he’s baiting me, trying to provoke me into doing exactly that. I was a litigator. However, Alex’s own knack for negotiation has helped him make several fortunes—not just producing movies but, earlier, in technology (video-editing software) and retail (two clothing store chains he cofounded and sold, One-Dimensional Man and, for women, S&O, which secretly stood for “stylish and overpriced”). Steady, girl.

  This isn’t the first time in a stressful, delicate human encounter when I’ve found myself thinking of the two flying lessons Chuck Levy gave me over Lake County when we were eighteen. As you start your descent, think of the glide path and maintain a consistent approach to the runway.

  “It’s about growing up, yes, being kids. Wilmette but also college, freshman year, all the craziness. All th
e craziness.”

  Too much speed is what messes up landings—you’re going too fast, bring up the nose.

  “And my life afterward.” Control your rate of descent. “You know, the roads taken and not taken, there but for the grace of God, etcetera.” Keep lowering the flaps, but increase your power. “Mistakes were made. And I’m writing about those. We don’t need to keep the old secrets anymore.” You’ve touched down.

  The pause lasts so long that I start to think the call dropped or he’s hung up.

  “I am not trying to lay off the blame on you or Chuck or Buzzy. We each did what we did. What happened, happened. It was 1968, for God’s sake. We were eighteen, nineteen. I mean, it’s not as if, you know …”

  “Hollander? I’m afraid I’m losing the plot here.”

  “I’m not recording this call, Alex.” Although I ought to be.

  “I’ve no idea at all what you’re talking about,” he says. “None. Zero.”

  “You know precisely what I’m talking about.”

  “Easy-peasy, darling, don’t get all … shirty. I haven’t a clue, honestly. I do sometimes have some short-term memory issues from the Topamax, which I take for the bipolar, but nothing long-term.” I learned only recently, from Vanity Fair, that he was diagnosed ten years ago with bipolar disorder, which led to his investments in biotech. “ ‘Dreams and fantasies,’ you said, Hollander. I think maybe you’re mixing up the real and the fantastical, sweetheart.”

  “Alex, stop it. Don’t do this.”

  “Are you feeling all right? I think you could be a tad low. Maybe you need a fizzy drink or something? Test your blood?”

  “Don’t.”

  “What? Of all people, I know how strange you can get. I’ve seen it. I’m just worried about you, Hollander.”

  “You’re really going to play it this way, huh? Deny, stonewall, deny? Christ, Alex, I figured you might be freaked out by what I’m doing, but I never thought you’d do this.”

  “You really are sounding a little barmy. If I didn’t know your assistant was there with you, I’d be arranging to get you to hospital right now, calling Cedars-Sinai to send over the EMTs. You’ll realize later I’m right. I love you. Go get some sweets. See a doctor.”

  “Fuck you, Alex.”

  I hang up the phone, open my top desk drawer, stick a test strip in the meter, prick a finger, squeeze out blood, watch the five-second countdown—98, absolutely normal—and slam the drawer shut.

  8

  During the year before the first Bond movie appeared, the world had come to seem even more like an Ian Fleming concoction—the resumption of nuclear weapons testing by the U.S. and USSR, the Soviet missiles in Cuba, the new hotline between the Kremlin and the White House, the defection to Moscow of the British intelligence agent Kim Philby, the British war minister caught having an affair with a nineteen-year-old who was also a Soviet spy’s mistress.

  Our Bond devotion had become even more elaborate. We performed half a dozen more missions. For one, Chuck mounted a little camera on his radio-controlled airplane—I hadn’t realized how gigantic the thing was—and we flew it near the navy base by Highland Park, taking spy pictures.

  And then came the movie Dr. No. Starting that summer, 1963, all the other kids suddenly knew about James Bond. Wendy Reichman owned the 45 of the Dr. No theme song before I did. At the Crawford twins’ pool party, everyone said Susie’s white two-piece suit made her look just like Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, and Jimmy Graham pretended his glass of 7-Up was a cocktail and introduced himself repeatedly as “Graham … James Graham.”

  Chuck and Alex and I didn’t say so, but our private world of fictional violence and glamour paled pathetically in comparison to Hollywood’s official version. The movie explosions in particular made Chuck yearn to blow up stuff. We had been a secret cell of cognoscenti performing a secret homage, taking actual risks out in the real world, inventing everything on the fly, scaring and surprising ourselves. All at once Bond was like a Barbie doll or a Disney-branded Davy Crockett coonskin hat, everywhere and available to everyone for a dollar. We no longer felt so knowing and subversive. We had been demoted to … fans.

  Also, we knew we were getting too old to be doing this. When we’d discovered Bond, we were barely twelve, but in the summer of 1963 we were fourteen, headed for New Trier in the fall. Twelve-year-olds pretending to be spies and make-out artists was clearly a fictional conceit, but now that we were going to be in high school, racy behavior was supposed to be on the menu for real.

  One night that summer, the three of us went bowling at the alley near my house. Alex and I were drinking Fresca—new, like everything that year. Including my romantic interest in Chuck, unleashed when he played the Dr. No theme song on his Stratocaster.

  When I sat next to him on the bowling alley bench and our thighs touched, I wanted to believe he was excited, too.

  I pretended not to know how to fill in the scorecard so that he would lean over me from behind, his chest against my shoulder, his warm right arm rubbing against my left as he wrote. Did he feel my goose bumps rising?

  For no reason in particular, I suggested that on the next mission, I might be a man.

  “No, no, no,” Chuck said. “I mean, without a girl character, we might as well just play army.” No self-respecting boy older than eleven, twelve max, would ever play army.

  “We could invite another girl,” I suggested.

  “It’s too late.”

  By which he meant that our club and its rules were too well established to assimilate an outsider, and that anyone our age was either too old to buy in to it or too uncool if they would.

  Chuck’s ball guttered. As he walked back toward me, I watched him rub his hands together, then rub them on his hips and his rear.

  “Also?” he said to me. “You’ve got blue eyes. Almost all the female characters do.”

  Chuck Levy knew my eyes were blue!

  “One of you guys could play a woman,” I said. Maybe I was serious. Mostly, I was messing with them. “That’s what actors did in Shakespeare’s time.”

  This prospect amused Chuck. “Yeah, Mr. Fresca,” Chuck said to Alex, “you could be Rosa Klebb.” Uh-oh. “Some Like It Bond.” Alex had made the mistake of telling Chuck that Some Like It Hot was one of his favorite movies.

  Chuck rolled again and got a spare. Even before he punched a fist in the air, the sight and violent sound of him knocking down all the pins made bowling more thrilling than it had ever been.

  “Hey, you’re the one who thinks the Crawfords are gross,” Alex finally retorted. “You’re the one who likes ‘em flat.”

  Chuck scowled at Alex as he walked back, sat down, and penciled in his score. He was pissed. I was thrilled. (I was flat.)

  The carnal tang of our Bond hobby was undoubtedly part of why we found reasons to put off the next mission for most of the summer. We were all busy. I had summer school in the mornings—touch typing and, as a sop to my mother for leaving the Church, advanced Esperanto—plus, I worked afternoons at my uncle’s law firm in Evanston. Alex had youth theater and took two family vacations, to Toronto and Acapulco. Chuck mowed lawns almost every day.

  One Saturday morning when Alex was in Canada, Chuck phoned.

  “I’m going down to Evanston to see the first showing of The Great Escape. Want to come with?”

  Finally. Not lunch in the cafeteria or an after-school snack at Bob’s with Chuck and Alex, or a study session at the library with Chuck and Alex, or watching TV with Chuck and Alex, or a mission. A movie. With Chuck. I grinned. I tingled.

  “Sure!” I said, already imagining us making out, as I had imagined many, many times during the previous three months.

  “Great.”

  Yes: great.

  After the movie, Chuck and I wandered toward Northwestern. Being by myself with him—really by ourselves, outside school, outside Wilmette—made me nervous, which I attributed to his sudden, shocking maleness. I opened my purse and took out Dad’
s transistor radio, which I’d borrowed for the day to deal with exactly this one-on-one contingency. Music could fill the dead air.

  But Chuck was talkative. The movie had made him jitter with boy-man excitement, the way he got after missions. “God,” he said, “that was so unbelievably great, wasn’t it? I think it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen.” The last best movie he’d ever seen, a year earlier on TV, was Rebel Without a Cause. He was grinning and breathing heavily. “And Steve McQueen not getting away at the end, back in the camp, back in the cooler with his baseball and glove! Man oh man. Can I have a cigarette?”

  Chuck, who swam competitively, had been conscientious about smoking only on missions. A few months earlier, I would’ve teased him about this transgression. He leaned in toward me and I lit him, his hands cupped around mine to keep the flame from blowing out, his fingers touching my skin for three, four splendid, breathless seconds.

  “Thanks,” he said, smiling, then stepping back and taking a deep drag.

  It was as if we had just made love. Ian Fleming had taught me that people smoke after having sex.

  “I liked it a lot better than Dr. No,” I said, “because it was actually funny and actually serious. Instead of never quite funny and never quite serious.”

  “Yes, right, that’s exactly right, Karen.”

  Exactly right. And not Hollaender—Karen.

  “That’s a problem with Bond, you know?” he said. “Not just the movie but the books get so unbelievable. I mean, this was so cool because that actual story, The Great Escape, it really happened.”

  “Yeah. But SMERSH was real. MI6 and the KGB are real. Ian Fleming did intelligence and espionage.”

  “Yeah, twenty years ago, during the war. Everything about the Russians, he probably makes up. And SPECTRE? Come on. It’s such phony baloney. Also? Every single mission Bond goes on, he gets caught by the villain.”

  That afternoon, two years into our worship of Bond, I found his heresy exciting. “Alex’d be going nuts if he were here,” I said. “His ‘Fiction can be truer than facts, you retards,’ and all that.”